So Poe

Last night I watched the most gruesome and darkly comic Forensic Files* and one that reminded me of the horror of Edgar Allan Poe’s writing.

Here’s the story: A man and his wife were axed to death in bed—but not quite. The cops on the scene found the dead husband downstairs, collapsed, blood all over him, the house, the floors, the kitchen, his socks, even outside on the doorstep. He’d been axed sixteen times. The wife was axed in the head in bed and still alive, but barely. The EMTs went to give her oxygen and couldn’t find her mouth she was so badly bludgeoned. She actually lived, and with surgery, her face was almost normal except for the two huge scars that told you exactly where the axe had landed.

But here is the freaky part: the husband—axed sixteen times, remember—WOKE UP from the bed where he was axed, and went about getting ready for a normal day! He pulled a sweatshirt over his bloody head and clothes, went downstairs and started breakfast. He even went outside to get the newspaper, and when the door closed and locked —HE GOT THE SPARE KEY FROM ITS HIDING PLACE IN THE FLOWER POT AND LET HIMSELF BACK IN. Segoi! He finally collapsed right there with the paper in the front hall from lack of blood.

Here’s what happened: the axe penetrated deep enough to cut the neocortex, which obliterated the reasoning part of his brain, the part that said, Why am I covered in blood? What is this pain? OMG my wife is dead! This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife! But the axe blade did not reach deep enough to cut into the paleocortex, the part of the brain that controlled his primal instincts and second-nature habits, so he got up, made breakfast, got the paper, and even remembered where the spare key was hidden. This story is SO POE. A man doesn’t know he has been brutally axed and is minutes away from dying, covered in blood, reading the paper, making coffee…

What element of Poe’s writing does this remind me of? The nearness of death. The inescapability of the end for each of us. So near, it crosses over, and so human, I can feel it in my cells. Poe’s story, Loss of Breath, is about a man who, literally loses his ability to breathe in the middle of a heated argument with his wife, and then…meditates on this fact.

Poe gets right to the edge of death, then the spark jumps the gap, and I am dead. I can feel being dead. And not in the moment of crime, or the too-fantastic moment of being murdered, but in the almost pedestrian, creeping, ultimately more horrible understanding that death is here now, waiting patiently as we make coffee, crack open eggs, reach for the morning paper.